Science of Security

A body of knowledge containing laws, axioms and provable theories relating to some aspect of system security.
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Visible to the public Tutorial: System Monitoring for Security

ABSTRACT: Intrusive multi-step attacks, such as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks, have plagued many well-protected businesses with significant financial losses. These advanced attacks are sophisticated and stealthy, and can remain undetected for years as individual attack steps may not be suspicious enough. To counter these advanced attacks, a recent trend is to leverage ubiquitous system monitoring for collecting the attack provenance for a long period of time and perform attack investigation for identifying risky system behaviors.

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Visible to the public An Approach to Incorporating Uncertainty in Network Security Analysis

ABSTRACT: Attack graphs used in network security analysis are analyzed to determine sequences of exploits that lead to successful acquisition of privileges or data at critical assets.

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Visible to the public Learning a Privacy Incidents Database

ABSTRACT: A repository of privacy incidents is essential for understanding the attributes of products and policies that lead to privacy incidents. We describe our vision for a novel privacy incidents database and our progress toward building a prototype.

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Visible to the public Surveying Security Practice Adherence in Software Development

ABSTRACT: Software development teams are increasingly incorporating security practices in to their software development processes. However, little empirical evidence exists on the costs and benefits associated with the application of security practices.

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Visible to the public Global Variation in Attack Encounters and Hosting

ABSTRACT: Countries vary greatly in the extent to which their computers encounter and host attacks. Empirically identifying factors behind such variation can provide a sound basis for policies to reduce attacks worldwide.

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Visible to the public On the Tradeoff between Privacy and Utility in Collaborative Intrusion Detection Systems-A Game Theoretical Approach

ABSTRACT: Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are crucial security mechanisms widely deployed for critical network protection. However, conventional IDSs become incompetent due to the rapid growth in network size and the sophistication of large scale attacks.

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Visible to the public Leveraging Unique CPS Properties to Design Better Privacy-Enhancing Algorithms

ABSTRACT: Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have unique properties that can be exploited to design new privacy-enhancing technologies that minimize the negative impact to the utility of CPS. In this paper we show two examples of these properties.

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Visible to the public Characterizing Scientific Reporting in Security Literature: An analysis of ACM CCS and IEEE S&P Papers

ABSTRACT: Scientific advancement is fueled by solid fundamental research, followed by replication, meta-analysis, and theory building. To support such advancement, researchers and government agencies have been working towards a “science of security”.

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Visible to the public Tutorial: The Bugs Framework (BF) "Hands-On"

ABSTRACT: Advancements of scientific foundation in cybersecurity rely on the availability of accurate, precise, and non-ambiguous definitions of software weaknesses (bugs) and descriptions of software vulnerabilities. The Bugs Framework (BF) organizes software weaknesses into distinct classes, such as buffer overflow (BOF), injection (INJ), faulty operation (FOP), and control of interaction frequency (CIF).

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Visible to the public Optimal Security Investments in a Prevention and Detection Game

ABSTRACT: Most security defenses can be breached by motivated adversaries, therefore in addition to attack-prevention technologies, firms investing in cyber-security for their information technology infrastructure need to consider attack-detection and restoration tools to detect intruders, an